Dear Fellow Club Member,
you are receiving this email because you are a member of the Exeter Wheelers and you’ve ok’d being contacted by the club. If you’d prefer not to be contacted then get in touch and asked to be removed from the email list.
If you haven’t yet paid your subs for 2025 then please do so by the end of this month of February – you can do so by clicking here. If you fail to pay your subs by 23:59 on the 28th February then you’ll no longer be a member of the club, and you don’t want that !
News for February:
Awards Night ! This will be on Saturday evening the 8th of March, starting at 7pm, at The Cowick Barton Cowick Lane, Exeter, EX2 9HF. We have secured the services of four times National Hill Climb Champion Andrew Feather, (who is ‘one of our own’ i.e. a previous member of the club), to hand out the prizes and to say a few words. There will be a Q&A session with Andrew later in the evening, so think of some questions! It’ll be serve-yourself meal, where there will be four options, two of which will be meat-based, one fishy, and a vegan option. The cost to members will be £10 adults and £5 for young’uns (under 16). Full details, including how to book your ticket, in due course. There is a maximum capacity of 48 at the venue, so it will be a case of first-come first-served. We will let you know when booking opens by putting info up via the News Section on the website, on our Facebook page and also via our Whatsapp Groups.
Club kit – Whilst the clothing supplied by Nopinz has all been well and good, it has been evident that a more affordable set of options would be appreciated by many members. With this in mind we’ve been in contact over the last few months with another kit supplier to have alongside Nopinz, and we are now ready to roll with this – the supplier is Shutt Velo Custom and here’s our club shop there: https://shuttcustom.com/collections/exeter-wheelers-cycling-club which should be live now. The shop is open until the end of February. Please note that the minimum order of any one item is 5 units – so it’ll be a good idea to communicate with other members to make sure that that limit is reached etc; Exeter Wheelers Facebook or the club Whatsapp group would be a good way to get in touch with others. You can have the items delivered to yourselves, which will presumably be at a cost, or you can collect them from Membership Secretary Rob Masterson in Exmouth, or better still collect them at a club Committee Meeting. Any questions get in touch via the info at Exeterwheelers.co.uk email address at the bottom left of any EWCC webpage.
At the last EWCC committee Meeting, following some determined and passionate agit-prop from Rides Officer and Escot CX race organiser Jon Hare it was agreed that all paid-up members of Exeter Wheelers can have free entry to races that the club itself organises. Full details are in the News Section on the website together with details of those races.
The next committee meeting is Monday the 10th of February, 7.30pm at The Cuckoo Bar in Sidwell Street. Come and say hello !
The stormy weather has been interfering with everyone’s riding, but hardy souls have still been out on various Wheelers’ club rides, with Craig and Owen Lawson leading the charge is some lengthy Sunday Club Runs – an ideal way to get those ‘base miles’ in.
Lutzy’s café down at the Piazza Terracina continues to serve the needs of the Saturday Social riders, and in the café they’ve even gotten to know individual EWCC riders’ names and chosen coffee types, and occasionally put cakes aside to ensure we don’t go hungry, bless them. The weather for today Saturday 1st of February is looking better for those heading out on this morning’s ride to Payhembury via Ottery St Mary. Next Saturday it’s a little hillier, via Mamhead, Haldon and the Teign Valley.
Participants needed; The club has recently received an email from a Luke Reynolds, who is conducting research at the Exeter Medical School, investigating the “Acute Effect of Remote Ischaemic Preconditioning on a Work-to-Work Cycling Test”, which some of you might be interested in becoming involved in, if only to find out your VO uptake levels – if you take part in his research then over the course of a few visits you’ll need to complete a series of tough ‘ramp’ tests (riding to exhaustion), and have fingertip blood tests taken. The plus side is that not only wlll you be contributing to medical knowledge but also “you will receive an accurate physiological report detailing your VO2max, thresholds, and individual training zones”. No pain no gain ! You can contact Luke at . You will need to be over-18 and ‘recreationally active’. You can look up Remote Ischaemic Preconditioning for yourselves . . . .
The calendar of the club’s racing events for 2025 is pretty much there, aside from the dates of our Evening Tens and the Escot CX event(s). We’re running four Open Time Trials and full details can be found here on the Cycling Time Trials website. As many of you will know, he CTT have recently moved to a new and upgraded website, and things are not quite settled with it yet, so be patient if it doesn’t yet quite work as you are accustomed. Mike Rose and Pete Bishop are meeting up with representatives of Sid Valley CC, CS Dynamo and Cranbrook CC early in February to divvy up the running of the Evening Tens amongst those clubs. On the Road Race front the prestigious Tom Hawkins Memorial Road Race will be on Sunday the 11th of May, with a new organiser in place following Joe Godwin’s stepping down from the role after having run it for longer than he’d care to remember. We thank Joe for all his hard work over the years. We’re also running a couple of Tuesday evenings of Westpoint Circuit Races, to take place on10th of June and 22nd of July. Race Organisers for these will be Gideon Aroussi and Jon Hare. These two events will be part of a SW series of circuit races (‘Crits’) with the others being run by other Devon cycling clubs down at the Torbay Velopark.
We can only provide races for riders, and do all the other things that a cycling club does, with the help and involvement of ourselves yourselves the members, so please please please consider volunteering to help when the various calls go out – the cycling community is a friendly one, and helping at events is a great way to support the sport you love and to meet other people who share the passion.
The South-West Cyclo-Cross League Awards Ceremony took place last Sunday 26th of January, in the St James Centre here in Exeter, and it was a well-attended event. EWCC’s Tim Carpenter is having a year off from his habitual Vet 50+ League Champion status, finishing runner-up, to the benefit of this year’s category winner James Bovey of Mid-Devon CC. Speaking with Tim afterwards, he said that this year he “never really got going, never felt great” due to the effects of a very nasty pre-season bout of the dreaded Covid, and was “amazed to even come 2nd in the league”. No doubt we’ll see better from Tim next season. We did, however, have 3 riders in the top 6 of the V50+, with Gideon Aroussi in 5th and Richard Taylor in 6th to add to Tim’s 2nd spot. Gideon won two of the 50+ races, including Exeter Wheelers CC’s Escot round. Nick Helsing was also there in the V50’s, but he’ll be moving up to the 60+ next season, to race alongside the super-super-vet old timers who really ought to just go and play lawn bowls or something. Jon Hare was out best-placed 40+ rider in the final league tables, finishing in 7th spot, one place ahead of Adam Sainsbury. 17 club members took part in the SWCX League, the youngest being Filipe Pacheco in the Under-10s and the oldest was your club secretary in the V60+.
Our Audax events don’t get under way quite yet, but for those of you of the long-distance persuasion there are a couple of Bristol-based events later in February, and you’ll be able to find out more via the Audax UK web pages
We welcome new members David Binding, Phillip Harris, Kyle McCormick and Luke Osborne to our ranks.
Luke is a relative newcomer to Devon: “My wife and I moved into the area last year as she has secured a research PhD with Nike at Exeter University aimed specifically at middle distance performance in women, which has been an amazing opportunity and will lead to some very exciting (albeit confidential at this stage) projects, so watch this space!”
He is a rider of considerable standing in Time Trials, having finished 8th in the National Irish Time Trial Championships in 2023 on a demanding 21 mile course, an event won by Bora-Hansgrohe rider Ryan Mullen, with EF Education’s Ben Healy in second place.
Of his 2024 racing Luke said: “Last year I was placed 16th in the national 50 with 1:46:08, happy with that as it was my first crack at the distance, although the persistent rain got into my shifters so I had to dismount twice to manually reseat the chain in the last 5 miles, so there’s a bit of free time there. Also placed 2nd in the SW 25 champs with a 51 low, found the pacing challenging for 25, certainly need more practice there.”
Of this year 2025 he added “This year I’d like another crack at the national 50 as I believe it’s in South Wales and the 10 as it’s in the South-West. Life has got in the way a bit this year somewhat, so I am on the back foot fitness wise but sure, cycling isn’t everything ! 😅”
Meanwhile, as one speedy rider joins us, another departs . . . Tristan Kelsall-Spurr has moved on to Okehampton CC, specifically because he wants to ride with his three best cycling mates there (who are speedy fellows to be sure) and to have the opportunity to race with those friends in 4-man senior team. Tristan spoke of his time with the Wheelers fondly, as follows: “Having made the switch from running to cycling during lockdown, I joined Exeter Wheelers in September 2022, where my first act as a member, and also my first ever bike race, was the club’s Open Hill Climb, where I was fast enough to win the Exeter Wheelers CC member’s Trophy. That got me hooked on bike racing. Thanks to all the support and advice of fellow Exeter Wheelers, last year I then progressed to road racing, cyclo-cross and road bike TTs. I have really enjoyed my time at Exeter Wheelers and made many good friends. It’s been fun riding and racing with you all! It’s a great club. I’m not disappearing – I will still see many of you out about, when training, or at races. Best of luck to all of you in your training and racing this year! “
Tristan (right) plus Jon Hare and Aaron Lawrence at the December 2024 UECC CX at Exminster.
That’s all folks, and if any of you have anything you want to send in for inclusion in the March newsletter then email . Contributions, personal stories and angles all welcome.
Safe cycling one and all.